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VoiceGateway records what it estimates you spent. Your provider records what they actually charged. These will not match exactly, by design: VoiceGateway estimates from per-request unit counts at a snapshot rate, while the provider bills against its authoritative meter and applies discounts, plan tiers, or post-hoc credits. Expected drift is up to ~5% on LLM cost (rate sheets change often) and lower on STT/TTS, where the billing unit maps directly to what VoiceGateway records.

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When to reconcile

  • Once in the first 30 days after deployment, to catch setup errors before they accumulate.
  • After a provider rate change, to confirm the catalog refreshed in time.
  • Before sending invoices that pass AI cost through to clients or internal teams.
  • Whenever VoiceGateway’s number diverges from a provider dashboard by more than 5%.
This is a spot-check and incident-response flow, not a per-billing-period requirement.

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Supported providers

voicegw reconcile supports exactly three providers today, each tied to one modality: openai (LLM, unit tokens), deepgram (STT, unit audio_s), cartesia (TTS, unit chars). No other provider (including Anthropic, Groq, or ElevenLabs) is currently supported.

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Prerequisites

  • VoiceGateway recording to SQLite (storage.path set in voicegw.yaml).
  • A provider usage export for the same window, converted to VoiceGateway’s format. See Reconcile file formats.

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Workflow

1

Pull the VoiceGateway side (optional)

reconcile reads the database directly, so this step is only a sanity check before diffing.
2

Convert the provider export

Each provider’s dashboard exposes a usage export in its own shape. Convert it once with the per-provider snippet on Reconcile file formats:
Deepgram: console.deepgram.com/usage. Cartesia: play.cartesia.ai.
3

Run reconcile

--format csv or --format json give machine-readable output. --threshold (default 5.0) sets the cost-diff percent that flags a row.
4

Interpret the diff

Unit-side drift means VoiceGateway missed or miscounted events. Cost-side-only drift means the rate sheet moved.

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Interpreting specific patterns

Units agree, cost diverges. voice-prices hasn’t caught up to a rate change, or your account has a non-public discount. Try:
Units disagree. Either a streaming request dropped before VoiceGateway saw its usage event (check voicegw logs for failed to record cost / incomplete usage), or the provider bills a unit VoiceGateway’s catalog doesn’t split the same way (e.g. realtime vs. pre-recorded audio). A model appears on only one side. (no provider data) means the provider’s billing dashboard lags (wait 24-72h and re-pull) or VoiceGateway routed to the wrong model id. (no vg data) usually means another client is sharing the same API key.

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Why estimate instead of mirror

Provider billing APIs often lag the request by 24-72 hours, so a real-time dashboard needs its own fast estimate. Maintaining seven providers’ billing APIs inside VoiceGateway is not worth the tax when reconciliation already exists as the audit step. Use VoiceGateway for real-time observability; reconcile against the invoice when a number needs to be exact.

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See also

voicegw reconcile

Full CLI flag reference.

voicegw export-costs

Inspect VoiceGateway’s per-request rows directly.

Reconcile file formats

Per-provider schema and conversion snippets.

voicegw costs

Quick summary without a provider comparison.